The year that is behind us now has extended the very logic of our sense of sacrifice and our sense of hope and we are not going to permit this to keep on being dragged into the New Year.

We want something new.

We want something refreshing.

We want something salving.

It was not the easiest of the years of our life even if last year’s was memorable for what pains we can remember, and what lesson we can draw from these pains, lessons that we pray will make us stronger so that we can do things better.

Part of this resolve—the need to recast our framework of looking at life anew—is to revisit the language we use to reword the vision we have for this year and all the years to come.

The poet T. S. Eliott reminds us of this responsibility when he wrote about the need for us to begin again in a new light, in an ever-new light: ‘For last year’s words belong to last year’s language/And next year’s words await another voice./And to make an end is to make a beginning.’

So many things went wrong in 2011.

So many went right as well.

Plus or minus, in the general scheme of things, there is a deficit of realizations as there is a deficit of the good events that should have visited us and given us some sense of the good life.

Truly, we need to demand from life. And this is a new language.

Truly, we need to demand from our society, community, state, and country. And this is a new language.

Truly, we need to demand from others. And this is a new language.

But truly so, we also need to demand from ourselves so that the vision we have to turn things right might come to a realization. And this is a new language too!

For a dream is only good if gives us the energy to go on, if it moves us, if it makes us hope for the best.

So many of us have been left with only one thing at this time: hope for the morrow, hope for the better.

Given this as our only weapon to fight it out and struggle for this dream to come true, we need to hold on to what this hope can offer us, including its power to instruct us of what is just and fair, of what is good and valuable, of what makes sense.

In our resolve, we need to trust again in our abilities, in what we can do, and in what we are willing to do to pursue something grander than our puny dreams and puny selves.

Out there is a world deprived of what we have, things we sometimes dismiss.

Out there is a world that has not experienced our experience of abundance during the holidays.

Out there is another world that reminds us that our world in this country is one of luxury, excess, surplus.

Out there is another world we cannot see because we have been ensconced in a position of convenience and comfort and as a result we can no longer see the inconvenience and discomfort of others.

Out there is another world that does not look like our own—and we refuse to recognize this world: one of misery, one of wretchedness, one in dire need of redemption.

The challenge for the coming year is this: to see once again that this world, in light of the message of hope for us all, can be made a better place for the many who have less in life.

For the many who have been deprived of their basic freedoms.

For the many who have been deprived of the day-to-day expressions of the good life.

For the many who are still dreaming of the blessings of real democracy and true justice.

Aloha to a Public Servant--Consul General Julius Torres Comes to Hawaii

By Aurelio Solver Agcaoili

I knew it would be tough getting a schedule to interview the new Consul General Julius Deloso Torres.

He had just arrived, and my request was too soon.

Even when then Consul General Leoncio Cardenas was about to retire, I already wrote to Deputy Consul General Paul Cortez to ask for a chance to sit down with the incoming consul general who would be coming from Amman.

He was warming up and trying to get settled, and here I was, egging on, asking for the moon, and asking for the impossible. He had out-of-state appointments, the appointments secretary told me.

But he was gracious, and in between my final examinations at the sate university where I teach, I got an afternoon to sit down with him. I was to probe his mind.

I arrived at the Philippine Consulate General on Pali Highway some ten minutes earlier than the schedule, with an Observer staff photographer in tow.

There was light rain on the streets. Towards the west, two rainbows displayed their spectacular colors as if announcing to all those who would like to watch that in the days ahead so many good things will come for the people of the Philippines. I went straight to the main door, past the consular offices.

Not far away, two men got out of a car.

I have not met Consul General Torres before and I had no idea how he looked like. One of the men wore a green long-sleeved barong, the verdant color of life. I knew right there and then that he is the new consul general.

“Are you coming for the interview?” he asks.

“Yes, sir,” I respond. “I have a schedule with the new consul general. At two.”

“You came on time,” he says. “We just had lunch.” He offers his hand.

“Thank you for giving in to my request,” I say and I shake hands with him.

He lets us in into a huge receiving room by the first floor of the consulate general. A portrait of President Benigno Aquino III hangs on a wall that leads to another inner room that I have become familiar with because of a previous media briefing I had to attend prior to the Asia Pacific Economic Conference in November.

From a stint at the Philippine Embassy in Jordan as the ambassador for about three years, Consul General Julius Torres comes to us with a fresh vision of what it is to serve the people of the Philippines everywhere.

His more than thirty years of career service with the Department of Foreign Affairs plus a hands-on experience as press officer of the late Foreign Affairs Secretary Carlos P. Romulo have prepared him to go where his service is needed.

He has been all over, with postings in a number of embassies: Bucharest, Saipan, Brussels, Canberra, Koror, and Toronto. His degree in journalism and his training in civil law, both at the University of the Philippines, came in handy in his various posting, able to merge both the requisites of diplomacy and the need to take good care of Filipino citizens in these places of assignment.

He did not plan to become a career diplomat.

Fate had it that he would become one when, at the height of his activism during the now famous First Quarter Storm, a time when the basic rights of people existed as a fiction during the dark days of Martial Law, he resolved not to give in to the temptations of becoming a factotum of big business, the economic structure that has closed all avenues to giving a fair chance to the people of the Philippines.

He understood the meaning of capital, and the need to put in place the economic infrastructure of the Philippines state.

But he did not approve the unjust ways of exploitation and dehumanization, concrete realities he himself had seen as a young student of Philippine Science High School where he received his initiation into the just cause of fighting for the basic rights of the people.

Instead, he vowed to serve the people by going into public service.

There are a number of things that are clear to him—and one of these is that his service to the people of the Philippines would never be negotiable.

It is a commitment wrought in stone.

It is a commitment wrought upon realizing full well that the need to create a just and fair society for the people of the Philippines remains an ideal worth pursuing.

This was to be his motive for going into public service, for joining the diplomatic corps.

He came from a town in Zambales that spoke Zambal and Ilokano.

But it is Zambal that stuck to him, with some ability to converse in Ilokano when forced, but not confident enough to carry a good conversation. It is in Zambal that he is most at home with, the language of his family, the language of his place, the language of his people.

He knows of the importance to picking up the Ilokano language to serve the majority of the Philippine population in this state. He says he is looking for someone who could teach him the rudiments of good, and effective, Ilokano. He says he is ready to learn.

From PSHS, he moved to the University of the Philippines at Diliman, and there registered for the sciences, in chemistry, for his bachelor’s.

But activism had its own energy in those days of disquiet in the late 70s, when life was snuffed out from the minds of the young people looking for a chance to contribute their talents and gifts for the homeland.

The dark night of misrule raged on, and its own rage got into his young heart.

He began to speak the language of social change, of democracy that had substance, of liberty that spoke of the good life for everyone.

Awakened to the realities of an indecent regime with its indecent, abusive ways, he resolved to take part in the struggle, for which reason forced him to drop out of school for a time and take part in activism in a more meaningful way. It would take him several years before going back to college, and finish his degree in journalism, instead of chemistry.

Journalism and its emancipatory promises led him to the doorstep of then Foreign Affairs Secretary Carlos P. Romulo.

There, he would be trained in the rudiments of writing, public relations, and public administration.

It would also open his eyes to the possibilities of a government service.

He took the Foreign Service examinations while in law school, and he passed. That was to be the beginning of his work in international relations and the end of his dream of becoming a lawyer.

We exchanged notes on our experiences.

There were serendipitous circumstances that led to the crossing of our paths.

While a faculty at the University of the Philippines at Diliman, I had my office fronting the avenue that was used to film Ruben Torres’ life.

The film, Kadre, would star Cesar Montano, and I watched the shooting from my window, curious as to how they used fire trucks to simulate rain dripping from the dense branches of rain trees that formed a canopy along the oval that stretched from the famous naked man in oblation by the administration building and back to University Avenue.

Julius D. Torres the consul general is the younger brother of Ka Ruben, the famous kadre.

The older brother is known for his earlier activism, and for the political leadership that he played during the early days of the Aquino Regime, right after President Marcos’ ouster from power.

I did not know the connection before that—and the serendipity began.

We talked of the FQS, when I was still in the province as a mute witness to the political activism of those priests and college students of the better colleges of my small city in the North.

The governor, Elizabeth Marcos, would paint the walls enclosing the capitol in pristine white. When the police people were not looking, the activists would turn the while walls into a canvass of rage and denunciation, the big words, in red paint, I would memorize.

“You were involved?” I ask.

“Only the deaf and mute would not be involved.”

“Were you afraid?”

“We were. But there was no other choice.”

“Do you regret?”

“No. My only regret is that I had to go back to UP to finish my degree. Nine years before getting my degree.”

“Is this activism the same energy we expect in Hawaii?”

“It is. And more. My stint in Jordan taught me valuable lessons. I had to fight for our people. I had to fight the people who were not in the know. Our people’s right to live the good life is non-negotiable to me. You cannot just simply say that we have to stop deploying our people. We do not have many options in the Philippines. And even if we officially say that, our people would figure out a way to go to Jordan illegally. In that way, they are at the losing end. In that way, there was no means to protect them. The best option is to negotiate with Jordan. And I did.”

“What is your view of our foreign affairs?”

“We ought to have a lean and mean bureaucracy. And an efficient one. We want trained professionals who know the merits of multi-tasking.”

“If you were offered the job of the Secretary of Foreign Affairs, would you accept?”

“I would do anything to serve our people.”

We talked more about our people, the prospects for a better homeland, the blighted lives of our wretched poor.

And we talked about the Ilokanos in Hawaii, their enduring spirit, and their capacity to survive.

Yesterday, you emailed me about what is happening back there in the home country.

You know well that even from afar, I keep tab of what is dished out by spin doctors who are in the business of tampering with history—or if you so wish, this business of writing history from their perspective, from their dominant position as power-holders who, for centuries and centuries on end, have not let up with their project and program of rationalized greed, wanton accumulation, and systematic prevarication to perpetuate, in an unceasing way, their stranglehold on us.

You are right, son, you are absolutely right.

These people, though born of the land, have not learned from the lessons of the past.

You were citing Jose Rizal in your letter, your phraseology renewing the same wisdom he shared with us in order for us to learn and see and know and understand.

You said: the book of the past is a book of knowledge since it is the repository of all the things that give us a handle, a direction, a sense of self, an idea of what is to come.

You said too: we need to take to heart this book of the past in much the same way we need air to breathe, air to live.

I do not know what to say even if I am your father and in linear time, in a reckoning that cuts up history into empty moments, time, and events, I am the past and you are the present and the future.

I can only laugh now and from my perch here abroad where the wind is cold and the mornings are foggy and the future of other lands and peoples are also divined and dictated in the war rooms of generals and presidents who have appointed themselves as guardians of democracy and Christianity, I see the distance between us: a distance in time, a distance in mind-set, a distance in the manner of loving our very land, our very heartland.

You say you want to take part in the remaking of history when I warned you of your going to the anti-war rallies, you and the rest of the young in the state university crying out loud that warning to the president and her cohorts and allies and jesters about their not knowing history and not learning from the past.

You were quoting Santayana, son—well, not exactly citing him but you and your battalion of idealists were restate his case: Those who do not learn from history will be condemned to repeat it.

You all were a mile away from the pretenders of intellect of the inangbayan, they who can only know how to corrupt Rizal and Santayana and the wise philosophers of old who talked of justice and love and peace and equality as not separate dreams but concrete realities that are part of a continuum.

Perhaps they did not read Diokno or they never understand how he articulated that intertwining of history and collective dream and the task of nation building.

Land and liberty, he said, are extensions of each other.

So do justice and jobs.

So do food and freedom.

What a way of reading history—of opening up its can of worms in order to name our pains, christen our sorrows, diagnose our seven times seven years of solitude.

Ah, that biblical number comes to me like a ghost lurking at the back of my head even as I try to distance myself from this little talk we have—a father and son talk, if you so wish to call it that way.

But I would like to believe that the reverse is truer: That you set this whole discourse into motion, you who are so young and yet pestering me with our business towards the future.

Is it the case that you have read so much about the need to reread our history by reclaiming our stories and allow the real actors to come forward and narrate of their actions and courage and boldness and daring?

May the good Lord of life and history, you who are so young and yet who are conscious of our destiny be blessed more and more.

The Lord of liberty and freedom and justice is the Lord of history, son.

The incarnation story, minus all the gender and sexuality references, tells us so much about history power and truth in our quest for meaning and substance and redemption.

These people whom today play on our fate and our future are the very people who have come on our shores and took part in our feasting uninvited.

I heard you translating this long duration of oppression of our people into a mystical metaphor that harks back to two covenants of Israel, the old one that was so obsessed with the law of law and the second one that pillared on the law of love.

This oppression has been going on for a long time in human history and history itself has sided, it seems, those who have the cunning and gumption to rule over other unjustly.

You called this phenomenon as “the seven time seven years of solitude of our people” a la Gabriel Marquez in his artistic treatise of the solitude of the Latin American peoples and their centuries of oppression under Spain and Portugal and their allies, the priests and other religious leaders most specially.

Perhaps you were thinking of Rizal’s conclusion that when a country does not have the boldness and daring to open the books of its past, that country will never have stake of the future?

You said you are worried about the future and in your youth, at eighteen and in your prime, I should tell you that you have no cause for worry.

But to be honest: I have so much cause for worry even as you also tell me that perhaps there is a fair, fighting chance with that actor who never died in any of his films but always ended up vanquishing the cruel overlord and then, of course, hailed by the people as their hero and redeemer and savior.

But then again you said that this actor might not stand a chance at all since a broadcaster with the baritone to hide his ambition and to convince every foolish voter that he is indeed sincere and ever willing to be crucified on the cross in the name of the last Juan de la Cruz is offering himself up for immolation in the fire of the nation’s politics.

And then of course, the reigning queen in our politics-as-usual collective life wants us to believe her, she with her rice stalks for a bouquet in that multicolored poster splashed on all the city walls and house doors and concrete posts, she with her big American roses smiling sheepishly as if saying: Give me a chance, give me chance.

We must now reckon, however, in the way we must reckon everything in history: that we gave her the presidency on a silver platter in the hope that she would do better than the Erap of the masses, the Erap whose life was a product of programmatic publicity stunt.

REVISITING CHRISTMAS: THE WAY IT WAS, THAT WAY IT IS, AND THE WAY IT OUGHT TO BE

For the almost twenty-five percent of the population of Hawaii who descended from the various ethnolinguistic groups of the Philippines, Christmas in the land of exile is not the same as Christmas in the homeland.

The comparison is real, the nostalgia palpable.

For the many who have had a taste of what Christmas was in the home country, the contradictions of the celebration itself dwarf the message it brings to us: the coming into world of a God-made-man.

The master narrative—the grand story of epic proportion that has informed this practice introduced by the Spanish colonizers largely from the medieval interpretation of the Catholic faith—shaped and formed the Philippine understanding of what Christmas is all about.

It is a story of human salvation—all the salvation announced to mankind by an angel.

In the Philippines, as this story took root across centuries, the folk traditions had their way of interpreting what this was.

This paved the way to the summoning of the indigenous dramatic traditions that eventually paved the way to the ‘panagpadanon,’ or ‘panagpatuloy’ or sometimes known in the Tagalog regions as the ‘panunuloyan.’

Here, in this folkloric rendering into a dramatic genre of the story of the first family looking for a place to stay for the night, we have a pregnant Mary in her full term and Joseph, the saintly man who stood by his wife in thick or thin, that wife who bore a child ‘without knowing any man.’

Versions of this are everywhere in the Philippines, as is the renditions of this in stylize form in the diaspora, sometimes in Honolulu.

Central to the practice of celebrating Christmas, though, is food—and food galore.

The best menus come to town, so to say, in a tongue-in-cheek way, and are laid on the Christmas table.

But this is for those who have the means.

Those who have lesser in life have to contend with some other ways to celebrate Christmas the best way they know how: that aroskaldo, or rice porridge, with margarine to taste, and with some slices of chicken meat thrown in to suggest abundance and celebration.

In schools, there is that almost mandatory gift-giving, that, across the years, has given rise to so many names: manito-manita, grab-bag, or binnunotan.

All these are poor intimations of what is beneath the act of that God-made-man: his act of self-surrender, of getting into the human story by assuming flesh.

It is, of course, the big story Jesus the Christ.

At the other end of the human spectrum of the frenzied lives of people, and their complex wish for happiness is the subtext of commerce and gain.

It is Christmas that has been transformed into bargain sales, discounted rates, and that ubiquitous box wrapped in colorful ribbons, that, if you do not have, will make you less of a person.

This is Christmas turned upside down.

This is Christmas giving in to the power of profit.

At day-end, however, is the constant reminder that with the puto, bibingka, and usual Christmas party, we need to remember: that behind all this is the message: that we learn to give ourselves to others.

For a family in Hawaii, there is no better way of celebrating Christmas other than spending some quality time together.

It is this presence that reveals to us about the salving, the redeeming.

“I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope,” so says Aeschylus in the Agamemnon.

Given the challenges of our days, we are all exiles now, out into a world whose challenges are difficult to name.

We live in interesting times, indeed, and these present themselves to us in various ways, but with the same storyline at day-end: there is hardship in our days.

The statistics of our American lives speaks of something so different from that dream through which we have found the road to here, in these shores and beyond.

Our children, so the news says, are at the receiving end, with their education at stake with the new talks of budget cuts, of controlling government spending, and of removing subsidies for the poorer families.

The numbers do not tell us something better: about one of every four children is deemed poor.

With job prospects dim, and unemployment at a rate that does not suggest some light at the end of our bleak world, we welcome the birth of a man-god with these thoughts.

In Oahu, the corporal work of mercy—the feeding of the homeless—has become a ritual for some people of the Philippines who have found their lot in life a bit better than those who sleep on road pavements and in parks.

They are the same people who were swept away like dust during the week of the Asian Pacific Economic Conference, and hidden somewhere for the delegates of the other twenty-one countries to not see.

For this is Paradise—and as such, the beggars and the homeless and the poor and the wretched are not to be found here.

These are the thoughts that hit us hard as we hum our way to the day of Christmas, thinking of silent nights and mistletoes and some Santa Claus coming from somewhere riding on a sled pulled by a reindeer with a human name.

In our tropical days, the images are not even apt, and yet we swallow these hook, line, and sinker presuming that this might give us good luck.

At the back of all these is the loss of the meaning of Christmas, and that meaning that relates to a living hope that the man-god gave us.

Despair is easier to name when one cannot hope any longer.

And so this leads us back to our duty: to give hope to the hopeless.

Some one said that: ‘Never deprive someone hope; it might all they have.’

In deed, in a world such as ours, we need to go back to the meaning of meaning itself, and say, that in life as in our need to live on, ‘Hope is only love of life.’

There is much promise of Christmas.

There is much promise of this man-god of history, this man-god of our times, this man-god of our dreary days.

That promise is none but the promise of hope.

We keep this promise of hope, indeed, a dream because it is the only one we have got.

We can only hope for the best, even as we say that hope will spring eternally from the heart that loves.

(The novel tackles the life of five daughters and a mother. Two of the daughters are in the United States; the three are left in the home country trying as much to live life they could in earnest and in the raw. All the five daughters carry with them the wounds that precede redemption: the wounds of life, the wounds of memory, the wounds of family, the wounds of relationships, the wound of discovering the rugged path to self-discovery and healing. The novel is an allegory of the Filipino condition, with the mother going nuts and out of her senses, losing sight of the particularities and demands of time, losing awareness of the healing power of forgiveness, and leaving her daughters to trek through life’s rough roads without her, without her blessing, without her word that ought to have soothed and salved them. The daughters, after forgiving each other, discover their common pains. They learn to forgive themselves and all the people who wronged them. In the end, they conquer their own private purgatories to inaugurate their own redemption.)

January 20, 2005Barangay SinamarLinglingay, Isabela

Lagrimas, Adingko,

Things are not easy either down here.

I am at the cocoa and coffee fields of mother’s father.

Auntie Sita asked me to come by here and go figure out what are in the fine prints of our family’s mortgage with the bank.

I understand that the government’s bank—or what used to be the bank of the people but is now in the hands of the capitalists as soon as President Corazon Aquino rose to power form the ashes of her husband’s traitorous assassination by the enemy—is asking our family to pay up grandfather’s loan including the onerous interest.

Their demand is under the pain of foreclosure. So everyone is so concerned about what would become of the land if it goes into the wrong hands.

Grandfather had asked that he be buried in the land. The older sons did, his grave perched on one side of the hill overlooking the brook that irrigates our corn and coffee. So here, in these parts, is the memory of the difficult life of going through the terror of forgetting. If this land will be foreclosed, there is no way we can recover who we are.

Or part of who we are.

We all have run away from this land.

All of us.

Only the caretaker is left there, the tenant who has seen to it that after the death of grandfather, the land would be taken care of properly by believing that he will outlive all of us.

I really do not know much about loans and mortgages, you see. What has life in the religious convent taught me except to keep on with my recitation of the rosary during angelus and go after the kids of the rich during the day?

I have my degree in commerce, the education I got by sweating it out with the sisters who told me that they were working for Christ, that they were workers of Christ. I did all the sweeping and the hard labor and they were working for Christ, for Christsakes!

I swept floors and scrubbed clean the latrines of the convent school.

I prayed a lot when Lola Madre took me from Cauayan and brought me to this convent down in Urdaneta. She was friends with the sisters, you see. One of the sisters, she told me, was her novice in their convent up the hills in Baguio.

Oh I cleaned the dirt and dust of the convent, helped in the kitchen, did the laundry. And I prayed and prayed a lot too. I prayed for healing and I prayed that Nanang would have been better as dead meat.

I was her daughter, true.

But I knew in my heart I was not her daughter too.

I was her mistake.

I was her very, very costly mistake.

People were talking in that little barrio where I came, and from where we all came from.

The nights had ears.

The days had eyes.

The winds had both ears and eyes.

The people had evil thoughts, and they thought that were right.

And true enough, I began to see the big picture.

That I was to be the reminder of that act that led to her perdition.

Perhaps I had been her first mistake.

I do not know, Ading.

All I know is that I had an elder sister.

Nanang named her Josefa after the birth name of Lola Madre who had to drop it when she took the habit and became a mistress of novices in the bright, airy, and sweet-smelling hills up in Quezon, in Baguio, that city by the hill carved out of our tropical heat by the colonizing Americans who needed to imagine what mountain air was in order to survive in the Philippines.

Josefa had bright eyes as a child. There was laughter and joy and contentment in those eyes that spoke of innocence mother knew nothing about.

She had curly hair like those of the young corn in Tatang’s field.

She lived a few months after the guardian angel left her.

She lost her name and they had to give her another name.

I cannot remember now.

Must have been Wayawaya in honor of the memory of people on a June day when at school we had all those elaborate ritual on flag raising and reciting our oath to love our country and motherland.

I remember those independence ceremonies that would require us to wear something ethnic, something that came close to a parody of the revolutionaries against the Spaniards and then eventually against the other colonizers.

How I wish I were Mother Philippines.

I would imagine my being the motherland, me in my flowing dress of red, white, and blue silk sewn by the best dressmaker in town.

In my suit of the three colors, I would declaim: “Mother Philippines, beloved teachers, parents, guests, ladies and gentlemen: I come before you to say that today marks our independence day, this glorious day of our freedom, this glorious day marking our desire to be free again.”

Even as I imagined that I would be our country, I had Nanang monkeying with my dreams.

Again and again she would run away even on Independence Day that my imagination was wildest and purest.

I was five when she first did it, as far as I know.

But then Tatang said she had run away before right after Manang Josefa died.

Maybe she was looking for her lost child, Tatang said to me one day before he decided to die and end all the shame and embarrassment Nanang brought into his house.

I say Tatang decided to die. I knew in my heart he wanted to die.

For many times he met death and each time he would spring back to life and pick up the pieces again only to end up dying again, dying gradually, painfully, taking in all the pain, the shame, the shame, and more shame.

She would run away with her free spirit with a new man.

She and her man would go to the mountains, romp the valleys, hide in forests and hills and in the bottom of seas and rivers.

She and her man would hide in the dark of the night.

She and her man would hide in the light of the young moon.

She and her man would hide in her dreams of vaudeville.

She and her man would hide in the comedia of the town, in the words of the characters she would love to mimic.

She and her man would hide in the meaningless words she would utter.

She and her man would hide in her actions of washing her hands every single second, every single minute, every single hour.

She said her hands were dirty.

She said her hands were bloodied by the death of her dream for the lost child, her dead child’s ghost haunting her, taunting her to give her some of her milk and not be selfish with the juice of her nipples, her body, and her womanhood.

She spoke of Manang Josefa in the present tense even when I was born, Tatang said.

When I was born, Nanang was calling out to Manang Josefa even as I was crying out for attention when the midwife was cutting the umbilical cord and Tatang was ready to put the other part of me on the earthen pot that he would hang in the tree top so I would end up on top of the world and not at the bottom.

I am grateful Tatang did that.

Or the Tatang that I knew to be my Tatang.

Or the Tatang that in death I realized was not my father after all.

This is where my sad, sad story begins, Ading.

There is sadness here and this sadness makes me alive.

It makes me remember.

It makes me remember all, all the details of this sorrow that has been my lot for a long, long time.

So, I write this letter to you from the land of the grandfather we never had the chance to live with because he ended up giving up so much of himself to the cause of the revolution.

He lived on this land.

He died on this land.

He died because of this land.

His death was witnessed by the trees he planted, the small brook he protected as if it were his own child, cleaning its sides, cutting the tall grasses on its sides, and shooing the reptiles that lived on its verdant banks.

I am here now to remember.

I am here now to reconnect all that which overtook us and make us hostage to the past.

I had to save my soul by getting into the nunnery and there, for years and years on end, I have thought of you all, you who are begotten of the same mother that begot me.

I never knew any place to run to. I never knew where to go.

Lola Madre, you see, had to save us. As soon as she learned that Nanang went nuts, she took charge of giving us a future.

One day she just came to Bai Regina’s house where I stayed as soon as Father had himself bitten by a rabid dog and in three weeks, he was dead.

Where would I go?

I had no one.

Our brothers had gone away looking for something real after they had their own minds.

It was a hard life, Ading.

A difficult one.

We had to part ways because there was no way we could live under one roof.

When father died, I was eleven. I just had my first of these rituals of womanhood even if I was just a child.

Manong Ben was fifteen and he was dreaming of a life of his own. So he went to live with an uncle who was a priest. The priest was running after his secretary and had many kids by the time Manong Ben caught them in the church belfry.

Duardo was thirteen. What, tell me, what could young people like us do when the only inheritance that was left with you were the bad memories, the terrible days of want and deprivation?

From this town, I will move to the field tomorrow, to the Linglingay of our grandfather’s dreams. The revolution in these parts started in his coffee and cocoa fields. There, he would entertain the revolutionaries of his fantastic tales during that revolution of his youth.

Sometimes I wonder why each generation has to have a revolution of its own.

I will write to you again when I get to Linglingay.

I will tell you about the memories that are alive because they are of the fields.

(The novel tackles the life of five daughters and a mother. Two of the daughters are in the United States; the three are left in the home country trying as much to live life they could in earnest and in the raw. All the five daughters carry with them the wounds that precede redemption: the wounds of life, the wounds of memory, the wounds of family, the wounds of relationships, the wound of discovering the rugged path to self-discovery and healing. The novel is an allegory of the Filipino condition, with the mother going nuts and out of her senses, losing sight of the particularities and demands of time, losing awareness of the healing power of forgiveness, and leaving her daughters to trek through life’s rough roads without her, without her blessing, without her word that ought to have soothed and salved them. The daughters, after forgiving each other, discover their common pains. They learn to forgive themselves and all the people who wronged them. In the end, they conquer their own private purgatories to inaugurate their own redemption.)

Chapter One

November 1, 2005
Waipio, Hawaii

Manang Ria,

I could not have said it in words.

I could have forgotten the right words even before I could utter any rational sound if I said this on the phone.

This is why I have chosen to write to you.

It is the time of the Internet but I have chosen to write to you the old-fashioned way.

I want our daughters to have a handle of what we have gone through and so I am leaving this letter as some kind of a trace, a palimpsest if you wish. Through this, my daughters will be able to begin to form their idea of our sad story. With this story, I hope that all our daughters will find grace and relief, that redeeming grace and redeeming relief we all have been looking for a long, long while.

It is evening here and as I light a candle in front of my house down here on Waipio that looks out on the lonely Pearl Harbor, I can sense the pain you are going through.

Darkness envelops the valley now and I could hardly imagine the silent vastness around me. Only the flickering lights come with their flimsy radiance, subdued as they are by the hidden sorrows the young night offers.

I think of myself now more often, me as an exile, an exile in so many ways. An exile through and through. A wandering, aimlessly roaming exile. I cry each time I realize I have run away from our common memories and from the land of our sufferings.

There is much pain in me as well.

This pain has no name and if you can help christen it, I will owe you my deepest gratitude. I will owe you my redemption too.

I do not know if I can ever forgive you for a past that we both do not have full control of anyway.

Perhaps, I miss so much the distinction between what you were capable of doing and that which the events in our lives simply pushed us into doing.

We were young, Manang.

We were so young—and unknowing.

And hungry.

And famished.

And unloved.

And impoverished.

There we were in that remote past of our lives fighting it out with the morsel of love that our parents were not capable of giving in the first place.

Things are not clear to me as of yet.

But I am beginning to see the bigger picture however faint the seeing is.

Many questions do come to haunt me.

Like, am I really your sister? Do I belong to you despite that fact that we do not share memories together?

Even as I ask these questions, other questions come cropping up like some kind of a ghost that does not know finitude but the eternity of lurking in shadows, in bad dreams, in phantasms.

Indeed, it is true. I have lived through all these and even from afar, I can say, I can say from my heart that I do not know you.

Well, I do not know myself either.

At a distance, I can see the hatred you have for Nanang.

I see this hatred transforming into some kind of matter, solid and hard as if it were a hardwood.

Or cement, able to withstand all the storm and the quake and the typhoon in the ravaged country, in the Ilocos as elsewhere in all of the islands where to go through the vagaries of the seasons is as quotidian as our own pains, our lamentations, our tears, our fears.

Manang, I had been so afraid of going hungry again.

Or going through the motions of everyday life without seeing any hint at that which is salvific.

I know—and deep in my heart I understand now—of your hatred for Nanang like the earthen tile that walled the convents of friars in our town in order for our ancestors to be shielded from the evil that they did, the abuses they seemed to have a natural fondness for.

O the friars!

We came from them, Manang. We came from them, from their sins and excesses and their promise of heaven.

On our mother’s side are the Martinezes of San Carlos.

They came from the illicit relationship of one Dominican friar with one of our own and the affair, consummated in the dark chambers of the convento down towards the river, bore the first ever of the Aguilars that gave us our mother’s father.

The Solvers, ha! They were land grabbers and manipulators.

Like all those mestizos who learned to live close to the municipio and close to the church and close to hearing the bells each time the Angelus was recited, the Aguilars took center stage in the affairs of the local government.

With the blessings of the friars that seemed to be as avaricious and greedy as the Aguilar whose skin had now turned to something lighter than light, something that resembled the Castilas, they gained entry to the civic affairs of the locality.

One of the Aguilars became a factotum of the gobernadorcillo. That was the beginning of more land grabbing, and the beginning as well of the Aguilars going outside San Carlos and moving to Dagupan and then eventually to the Ilocos and Isabela.

There, they had the land grants courtesy of the conniving friars, the Spanish rulers using the Aguilars for ends that had something to do with their occupational and colonial motives.

The Aguilar women played their role to the hilt as well with two of them bearing illicit sons from the illicit affairs of two more Castilas. The sons, bless them, did not live long to tell of their stories of being bastards as we all were—are.

This is going to be a long story, Manang.

I am taking the last light of the young evening to reclaim myself.

I have been running away from our memories.

I have been running away from the terrors and torments of Nanang as well even if at times I would have wanted to end it all, this striving to make ourselves saved, redeemed, forgiven.

I tell you it has not been easy, this constant running away.

Even from afar, from the islands that speak volumes of what possibilities there are for us over here, I am running away from our shadows.

And from our sad sad lives.

Our sad sad life story.

And now I say: I do not to go through this sadness again. No, not ever.

Even as I face the darkness of the night, I think of your there, all of you. This time, I am particularly thinking of you and our three other sisters.

I am not so certain if we are linked in a way with a biological father.

I am certain of one fact though: That we come from the same mother.

That we were nourished by the same body, our mother’s wild wild body, with her wild wild craving for anything that could challenge the sacred and the moral, the true and the beautiful, the good and the virtuous.

For mother did not know any of those, I suppose.

In these last lights, I can see what fragile stuff she was—is—made of.

Her imagination romped wild, went away with the many men that came after her, ran away with them to some far away places only to return to Tatang one more time.

That was a ritual, a given.

That going away and running away with her men happened many times.

Tatang was the father I did not know.

Tatang is the same father I now know.

Well, I never got to call him father.

I never even had the chance to hold his hands, feel the roughness of the calluses in those hands, feel the terror that hid in those hands, feel the sorrows hidden in between his tired fingers.

What a sad tale, this idea that I could have had the chance to get to know my biological father but the circumstances did not permit me to even say hello to him, not in a single instance that I could remember despite the fact that the little village we lived in all knew that which I should have known.

I only heard the knowledge in whispers. Do not blame me.

Now that father is gone, I do not know if I can ever forgive myself.

This business about us, five daughters of our mother of perpetual parody, what tough luck! Five daughters of three different fathers, well, that is something we can never run away from now.

We have to face this now with courage.

We have to face this now with daring.

How I wish I had that courage to tell Nanang what I have in my mind.

I cannot talk to Ditas about this.

I cannot give a hint to Lorena about what we all had to go through to destroy ourselves.

I cannot open up to Rosario about what evil visited us.

I look at the evening darkness now. There is this soft wind on my face. I feel the elements oneing with me, joining me in this sorrow, joining me in this hope for the morrow.

I close this note now, fold it three times the way Nanang taught me when I was six.

In her rare moment of sanity when Nanang was not running away, she would sit down with me and tell me stories about the hacienda of his father in Angadan or some such other exotic places to the Sierra Madres that spelled something sweet and hopeful like Sinamar.

She told me about the letters she would send to her Bai Regina in Dagupan.

The matriarch of the clan, Bai Regina had all the lands to her name.

Her two other sisters gave up their right to the land.

One of them was in the convent as mistress of novices in Baguio and who would forever dedicate her life to the cause of redeeming her family from sin. From the vestiges of original sin, she would say, in her fluid and frank Spanish.

The other sister was in Manila renting out her apartment rows to callboys and prostitutes and drug pushers aside from the regular and decent families who would come in for some time but leave right after discerning that they were in bad company. This other sister did not need much. She had sent her children to good schools and one ended up serving a President in Malacañang while her husband served as one of the Presidents close-in security.

Nanang wrote those letters as if there were no tomorrow, in a penmanship she learned in convent school in Baguio before the demons got into her head and eloped with Tatang to run away from the hard life of starting it out in the vast and rugged land of her father.

Nanang hated the land.

She wanted the glamorous life of the vaudeville, the superficial laughter, the paid smile, the noise for a fee.

She wanted all the dancing and the teasing on stage and so she dreamed of ending up like Atang dela Rama.

On hilltops, Nanang imagined life in Manila, in the cities, in movie houses, in theatres.

Nanang recited from memory the story of how her family had to leave Dagupan.

Her father ran over two schoolboys. They died on the spot. The families of the boys asked her father to leave Dagupan or else his whole family would be killed.

And so they had to run away, the whole family, run to where the vast lands were, rugged and needing coaxing and care and concern.

Three folds, neat and nifty for the letters. The same holds for this letter to you.

Three folds, as if in the trinity of our solemn wish to be able to forgive ourselves, to forgive mother, and to forgive each other.

Yesterday, you emailed me about what is happening back there in the home country. You know well that even from afar, I keep tab of what is dished out by spin doctors who are in the business of tampering with history—or if you so wish, this business of writing history from their perspective, from their dominant position as power-holders who, for centuries and centuries on end, have not let up with their project and program of rationalized greed, wanton accumulation, and systematic prevarication to perpetuate, in an unceasing way, their stranglehold on us.

You are right, son, you are absolutely right. These people, though born of the land, have not learned from the lessons of the past. You were citing Jose Rizal in your letter, your phraseology renewing the same wisdom he shared with us in order for us to learn and see and know and understand. You said: the book of the past is a book of knowledge since it is the repository of all the things that give us a handle, a direction, a sense of self, an idea of what is to come. You said too: we need to take to heart this book of the past in much the same way we need air to breathe, air to live.

I do not know what to say even if I am your father and in linear time, in a reckoning that cuts up history into empty moments, time, and events, I am the past and you are the present and the future. I can only laugh now and from my perch here abroad where the wind is cold and the mornings are foggy and the future of other lands and peoples are also divined and dictated in the war rooms of generals and presidents who have appointed themselves as guardians of democracy and Christianity, I see the distance between us: a distance in time, a distance in mind-set, a distance in the manner of loving our very land, our very heartland.

You say you want to take part in the remaking of history when I warned you of your going to the anti-war rallies, you and the rest of the young in the state university crying out loud that warning to the president and her cohorts and allies and jesters about their not knowing history and not learning from the past. You were quoting Santayana, son—well, not exactly citing him but you and your battalion of idealists were restate his case: Those who do not learn from history will be condemned to repeat it. You all were a mile away from the pretenders of intellect of the inangbayan, they who can only know how to corrupt Rizal and Santayana and the wise philosophers of old who talked of justice and love and peace and equality as not separate dreams but concrete realities that are part of a continuum.

Perhaps they did not read Diokno or they never understand how he articulated that intertwining of history and collective dream and the task of nation building.

Land and liberty, he said are extensions of each other.

So do justice and jobs.

So do food and freedom.

What a way of reading history—of opening up its can of worms in order to name our pains, christen our sorrows, diagnose our seven times seven years of solitude! Ah, that biblical number comes to me like a ghost lurking at the back of my head even as I try to distance myself from this little talk we have—a father and son talk, if you so wish to call it that way.

But I would like to believe that the reverse is truer: That you set this whole discourse into motion, you who are so young and yet pestering me with our business towards the future.

Is it the case that you have read so much about the need to reread our history by reclaiming our stories and allow the real actors to come forward and narrate of their actions and courage and boldness and daring? May the good Lord of life and history, you who are so young and yet who are conscious of our destiny be blessed more and more. The Lord of liberty and freedom and justice is the Lord of history, son. The incarnation story, minus all the gender and sexuality references, tells us so much about history power and truth in our quest for meaning and substance and redemption.

These people whom today play on our fate and our future are the very people who have come on our shores and took part in our feasting uninvited.

I heard you translating this long duration of oppression of our people into a mystical metaphor that harks back to two covenants of Israel, the old one that was so obsessed with the law of law and the second one that pillared on the law of love. This oppression has been going on for a long time in human history and history itself has sided, it seems, those who have the cunning and gumption to rule over other unjustly.

You called this phenomenon as “the seven time seven years of solitude of our people” a la Gabriel Marquez in his artistic treatise of the solitude of the Latin American peoples and their centuries of oppression under Spain and Portugal and their allies, the priests and other religious leaders most specially. Perhaps you were thinking of Rizal’s conclusion that when a country does not have the boldness and daring to open the books of its past, that country will never have stake of the future?

You said you are worried about the future and in your youth, at eighteen and in your prime, I should tell you that you have no cause for worry. But to be honest: I have so much cause for worry even as you also tell me that perhaps there is a fair, fighting chance with that actor who never died in any of his films but always ended up vanquishing the cruel overlord and then, of course, hailed by the people as their hero and redeemer and savior.

Then again you said that this actor might not stand a chance at all since a broadcaster with the baritone to hide his ambition and to convince every foolish voter that he is indeed sincere and ever willing to be crucified on the cross in the name of the last Juan de la Cruz is offering himself up for immolation in the fire of the nation’s politics.

And then of course, the reigning queen in our politics-as-usual collective life wants us to believe her, she with her rice stalks for a bouquet in that multicolored poster splashed on all the city walls and house doors and concrete posts, she with her big American roses smiling sheepishly as if saying: Give me a chance, give me chance.

We must now reckon, however, in the way we must reckon everything in history: that we gave her the presidency on a silver platter in the hope that she would do better than the Erap of the masses, the Erap whose life was a product of programmatic publicity stunt.

You have come to us one last time.From afar, we know this now: You are ever-present, and alwaysYou stand there, seeing what can be seenAnd with our hearts in lament and in songWe can only bid you goodbye, Manang Nellie,Elder sister to our longing.

You are the breeze from this sea,Wayaway, eastwind, giver of an elementThat moves me. It is the crack of dawnAnd this dream caught me so while youTake things in stride, caress the plumeriaLeaf by my window, in this cold of winter.By the Makakilo mountains, there You are now and dancing to the tuneOf whizzing lives, on their cars to put in timeFor the big men in Waikiki. The whole riteIs to put food on the table, and this becomesA repetition the way you leave me so. The cold gets to my stranger’s bones,Making me tarry to say this prayerOne more time in the corner altar of my day: Do not leave me wind, breathAir, breeze. Stay, stay longer and whisperTo me the definition of Honolulu morningAnd the means to the ceremony of goingThrough another celebration of the wordComing onto a page, this one aboutOur pains. Today, we launch yet anotherChance to hear our own voice. We say it louder,Clearer this time. We need to hear what we say. Like the daybreak, we see it coming,And soon is the noontime segueing Into the sacred hours of our exilic becoming.

Wayaway, eastwind, become ourAmian, our northwind, and fill our heartsWith a song no one wants to sing. Call out to the Abagat, tell it to resideIn our drunken nights, and make us sober,Alert to the lullabies of the Pangagdan,So there, with the amber sun setting, we get The fulfillment of a new rainbow’s dream For which reason we gather again.